Post-Summit Note

A quick note: We experienced some massive equipment failures this year, almost to the point where we were starting to seriously question our life choices. The end result is that we don't have as many session recordings as we'd hoped. Jason will be going through what we do have over the next week, splicing together what we can, and posting it to the YouTube channel. We appreciate everyone's patience and understanding.

About Don Jones

Don Jones is a Windows PowerShell MVP, author of several Windows PowerShell books (and other IT books), Co-founder and President/CEO of PowerShell.org, PowerShell columnist for Microsoft TechNet Magazine, PowerShell educator, and designer/author of several Windows PowerShell courses (including Microsoft's). Power to the shell!

The main problem for Macs, and possibly some PCs, is that the HDMI output is secured with HDCP. That means that it will display just fine, but that some recording devices (including the Live Gamer Portable) will refuse to record it. I've tried getting around this with an active MiniDP (Thunderbolt) to HDMI adapter, but that only works about 50% of the time - on the same Mac! The HDMI splitter method did not work at all. I'm too chicken to try some of the dodgier suggestions for stripping copy protection, as they involve equipment that some customers have claimed caused damage to their devices (!!!)

We've gotten new devices for PowerShell Conference Europe - the Live Gamer Portables were reasonably reliable, but generated enormous files that required post-processes. Well, reasonably reliable as long as the presenter was not on a Mac or a very high-res PC. As it is, I'm going to have the presenters on Macs use QuickTime screen recording as a backup method, and am considering putting together a similar fallback for PC users. So that we're not fooling with this as they're starting their presentations, we have invited the speakers to visit us once they get to Hannover to try the setup and will have guides in each room.

Our problem was largely centered around the fact that one of our hardware recorders physically died. We also had some problems interfacing the recorders to the scalers that were running the new projectors. I'll be frank: past Summit recordings get an average of under 500 views per video on YouTube. While folks are very vocal about the existence of the recordings, there's not a lot of evidence they're actually using them. Given the expense and human overhead, there's not a lot of ROI so far.